Posts Tagged ‘chief-of-staff’

Obama’s new Chief of Staff Jack Lew made the rounds Sunday, February 12. And he lied to every single mainstream media outlet that would welcome his lies. And not ONE network host challenged his Big Lie.

Jack Lew has been around. He is an experienced Washington insider who understands the rules of the political process. He actually served twice as Bill Clinton’s budget director. So to say he made a “misstatement” is simply a lie. Jack Lew tried to falsely demonize the Republican Party for the pathetic and abject failure of the Democrat Party to pass ANY budget for well over a thousand days (that’s nearly three years).

This was clearly no accident. Lew said the same totally false thing again and again on the morning political talk programs. As PolitifactCLEARLY points out:

Most business in the Senate is subject to filibustering — that is, actions, or even just threats, to talk a bill to death. Filibusters can be overcome by what’s known as a “cloture” vote that shuts off debate and moves a measure toward final consideration. For the Senate to agree to cloture requires 60 votes — a high threshold that many Senate majorities are unable to muster on controversial votes (and, increasingly, even on relatively uncontroversial votes).

However, the filibuster cannot be used to block a budget resolution. That’s because the Budget Act sets out a specific amount of time for debate in the Senate — 50 hours. If a specific amount of debate time is enshrined in the controlling statute, the filibuster is moot. So a simple majority — not 60 votes — is all that’s required to pass a budget resolution.

Indeed, passing a budget resolution by at least 60 votes has become increasingly rare in recent years, according to CRS data. Since 1994, the Senate vote has exceeded that vote threshold just three times, either in the initial vote or on a subsequent vote in which lawmakers consider an identical House-Senate version of the resolution.

More common in recent years are votes where 51 was enough to prevail. In 2009, the Senate even passed the final budget resolution by a 48-45 margin.

“The budget resolution vote is always a partisan affair, and rarely does it gain any minority party support,” said Steve Ellis, a vice president at Taxpayers for Common Sense.

So Lew is clearly wrong to say that “you can’t pass a budget in the Senate of the United States without 60 votes.” As a longtime senior official at OMB and other federal agencies, he should have known better.

Here are Obama Chief of Staff Jack Lew’s own lying words on two separate programs:

MR. GREGORY: So the leadership deficit in Washington has had an impact on what business does in America and certainly our economic outlook. Here’s a stat that a lot of people may not know, but it’s pretty striking. The number of days since Senate Democrats passed a budget is 1,019. Can you just explain as a former budget director, how do you fund the government when there’s no budget?

MR. LEW: Well, you know, one of the things about the United States Senate that I think the American people have realized is that it takes 60, not 50 votes to pass something. And there has been Republican opposition to anything that Senate Democrats have tried to do. So it, it is a challenge in the United States Senate to pass legislation when there’s not that willingness to work together. Congress didn’t do a great job last year. It, it, it drove right to the edge of a cliff on occasion after occasion. I actually think it’s unfair to blame the United States Senate for that. A lot of that was because of the extreme, you know, conservative approach taken by House Republicans.

The same Jack Lew – the same guy who was a budget director TWICE for Bill Clinton and without question understood that he was lying – went on CNN‘s State of the Unionthat same day and said:

CROWLEY: I know we’ll want to talk about the tax hikes in a second, but I want to read for our viewers something that Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader in the U.S. Senate, who said, we do not need to bring a budget to the floor this year. It’s done. We don’t need to do it, talking about last year’s two-year agreement and saying that, you know, so it’s already done.

This budget, I can assure you and you know, because you’ve been in this town for a long time, is going to be attacked as a political document. This is a budget that promises 2 million more jobs if it’s passed, so that come September the president can go out there and say, well, if they’d only passed by budget, we’d have 2 million more jobs, but those darn Republicans are standing in my way, when, in fact, even the Democratic leader in the Senate says, you know what, we don’t need a budget.

LEW: Well, let’s be clear. What Senator Reid is talking about is a fairly narrow point. In order for the Senate to do its annual work on appropriation bills, they need to pass a certain piece of legislation which sets a limit. They did that last year. That’s what he’s talking about.

He’s not saying that they shouldn’t pass a budget. But we also need to be honest. You can’t pass a budget in the Senate of the United States without 60 votes, and you can’t get 60 votes without bipartisan support. So unless Republicans…

And, yes, we need to be honest. Which means we have to abolish the party of pathological liars, the Democrat Party. And to finish his interrupted sentence, unless Republicans grow a set of testicles and rise up and hold the Democrats responsible for all of their vicious lies, this nation is doomed.

You need 51 votes to pass a budget. The Democrat Party currently has 53 votes in the Senate. When Obama took over, they had a filibuster-proof Senate and they could have passed ANY budget they wanted.

Ancient man did not talk in terms of “rights.” They talked in terms of DUTIES. They talked in terms of their duties as human beings, as family members, as citizens of a state. And any society that fixates on “rights” and abandons the pervasive sense of duty is a society that is on the verge of perishing. And the Democrat Party is riding the death of America like a jockey urging his horse to a faster pace into hell.

Benjamin Franklin said, “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” And THAT is the Democrat Party: the party of the end of the republic.

For Democrats, their “rights” ALWAYS impose duty on somebody else. It’s my “right” to have a sex change operation, and it is the DUTY of religious conservatives to abandon their four thousand years of Judeo-Christian revelation and affirm my choice to sexually mutilate myself so I can live in my depraved life. And it is the DUTY of those same religious conservatives to pay for that depraved act of sexual mutilation. Women have a right to get birth control, abortion-causing drugs and sterilizations without any sort of restriction of any kind whatsoever. And the Catholic Church has the DUTYto forsake one thousand-five hundred YEARS of clearly defined religious tradition and start providing “access” because Barack Obama is greater than God. The messiah has spoken, so let it be written, so let it be done.

It’s those medium- and long-term debt problems that also worry economics professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff, who served as a senior economist on President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He says the national debt, which the U.S. Treasury has accounted at about $14 trillion, is just the tip of the iceberg.

“We have all these unofficial debts that are massive compared to the official debt,” Kotlikoff tells David Greene, guest host of weekends on All Things Considered. “We’re focused just on the official debt, so we’re trying to balance the wrong books.”

“If you add up all the promises that have been made for spending obligations, including defense expenditures, and you subtract all the taxes that we expect to collect, the difference is $211 trillion. That’s the fiscal gap,” he says. “That’s our true indebtedness.”

Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff, to make it clear, is a noted economist. He is a research associate at the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a former senior economist with then-president Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He has served as a consultant with governments around the world. And he wrote about this issue of America’s true debt in a peer-reviewed journal of the International Monetary Fund (September, 2010). This isn’t a joke. This is our reality.

Which political party is completely responsible for these depraved government takeovers that will collapse and thus murder millions of elderly people whose only crime was being forced by the Democrat Party to pay into the Democrat Party’s boondoggle?

I think I’ve already hinted at the answer: the Democrat Party.

Democrats want to demonize Reagan and Bush for all the debt. As I’ve already pointed out, Barack Obama has already vastly outspent George W. Bush in less than half the time. But that debt is NOTHING compared to the TWO HUNDRED TRILLION DOLLARSthat Democrats are one hundred percent responsible for.

Which is to say that the same party from hell that constantly creates new “rights” that OTHER PEOPLE must pay for is likewise the party from hell that always makes OTHER PEOPLE responsible for the hell that they create.

What’s going to be the end of the party of lies???

One day, very soon, after the collapse that the Democrat Party will have imposed upon the United States and therefore the world that has depended on the strength and integrity of the United States for a century, a figure will emerge that the Book of Daniel warned us about nearly three thousand years ago and the Book of Revelation warned us about nearly two thousand years ago. Democrats don’t give a damn; they despise the Bible and openly mock it as a matter of routine.

When this beast comes, he will be the Democrat Party’s wet dream. He will be the big government “global unifier” that they’ve always dreamed of. Democrats will acclaim the Antichrist. They will vote for him. They will take his mark. And they will burn in hell for a well-deserved eternity of suffering for their crimes against the truth.

“I guess it’s more interesting to imagine this conflicted situation here and a strong woman. But that’s been an image that people have tried to paint of me since the day Barack announced. That I’m some angry black woman.”

Asked how she deals with that image, Mrs. Obama said “I just try to be me.” — Michelle Obama

Hey, Michelle, as you trot out the race card to demonize your critics, I’d just like to suggest the very real possibility that your problem is that you ARE an “angry black woman.”

You know, the kind of lifelong angry, bitter woman who would say something like this:

Michelle Obama was privately fuming, not only at the president’s team, but also at her husband.

In the days after the Democrats lost Edward Kennedy’s Senate seat in January 2010, Barack Obama was even-keeled as usual in meetings, refusing to dwell on the failure or lash out at his staff. The first lady, however, could not fathom how the White House had allowed the crucial seat, needed to help pass the president’s health care legislation and the rest of his agenda, to slip away, several current and former aides said.

To her, the loss was more evidence of what she had been saying for a long time: Mr. Obama’s advisers were too insular and not strategic enough. She cherished the idea of her husband as a transformational figure, but thanks in part to the health care deals the administration had cut, many voters were beginning to view him as an ordinary politician.

The first lady never confronted the advisers directly — that was not her way — but they found out about her displeasure from the president. “She feels as if our rudder isn’t set right,” Mr. Obama confided, according to aides.

Rahm Emanuel, then chief of staff, repeated the first lady’s criticisms to colleagues with indignation, according to three of them. Mr. Emanuel, in a brief interview, denied that he had grown frustrated with Mrs. Obama, but other advisers described a grim situation: a president whose agenda had hit the rocks, a first lady who disapproved of the turn the White House had taken, and a chief of staff who chafed against her influence. […]

But that spring, Mrs. Obama made it clear that she thought her husband needed a new team, according to her aides. When the president decided to deliver a lofty speech about overhauling immigration laws in June 2010, even though there was no legislation on the table and the effort could hurt vulnerable Democrats, Mr. Emanuel objected. Aides did not produce the speech he wanted and the president stayed up much of the night rewriting — but the address drew a flat reception. Mr. Obama was irritated, two advisers said, and told Ms. Jarrett to keep an eye on other top staff members to make sure that they delivered what he wanted.

Several West Wing aides said they had heard secondhand that Mrs. Obama was angry about the incident. Later, they said they wondered: was the president using his wife to convey what he felt?…

But at Mr. Emanuel’s 7:30 a.m. staff meeting the next day, Ms. Jarrett announced that the first lady had concerns about the White House’s response to the book, according to several people present. All eyes turned to Mr. Gibbs, who started to steam.

“Don’t go there, Robert, don’t do it,” Mr. Emanuel warned.

“That’s not right, I’ve been killing myself on this, where’s this coming from?” Mr. Gibbs yelled, adding expletives. He interrogated Ms. Jarrett, whose calm only seemed to frustrate him more. The two went back and forth, Ms. Jarrett unruffled, Mr. Gibbs shaking with rage. Finally, several staff members said, Mr. Gibbs cursed the first lady — colleagues stared down at the table, shocked — and stormed out.

This is, to my knowledge, the first administration with THREE chiefs of staff. So far. And all of them being appointed in a single term. And there is clearly a very angry black woman behind some of that mess, isn’t there? Maybe we should rename the position “Chump of Staff” after you get through shredding them.

So let’s say we don’t call you an “angry black woman” – and I don’t think anyone of note did until you started calling yourself that to score pity points with your “race card well-played” demagoguery. Let’s say instead we call you a “privately fuming black woman.”

But while we’re on the subject of “angry black women,” let’s recount a few other angry black women who got a face full of hell from the hypocrite elite media establishment; women like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann. And of course women like Margaret Thatcher.

Reporting from London — The face peering from the ads and posters belongs to Meryl Streep, but the shadow that hovers over the land is definitely Margaret Thatcher’s.

The reaction to the film “The Iron Lady” has illuminated just how polarizing “Mrs. T.” (or “TBW” — “that bloody woman”) remains a generation after her ouster from 10 Downing St.

Love her or hate her — and there are plenty of people on both sides — it seems that hardly anyone here can watch the movie without their personal feelings entering into it.

Put Sam Fogg in the “hate” camp.

“It’s not possible for anyone who’s lived in the Thatcher era to see it objectively,” the 57-year-old art dealer said after a recent screening in London. “I didn’t like it — it was a hagiography…. It didn’t show a lot of her economic and social policies that turned the country into the selfish modern England we live in now.”

The film, which features Streep as Thatcher in a bravura performance as Britain’s only female prime minister, is stirring up extra passion because it offers the British a look at their past just as they appear to be repeating it.

After a long hiatus, Britain is once again being ruled by Thatcher’s Conservative Party, led by politicians who grew up under her 1979-90 premiership and who consider themselves heirs to her small-government, free-enterprise ideology. In a drive to slash public spending, officials have embarked on a series of stinging budget cuts as deep as any she ever ordered.

The unemployment rate, which soared during her first years as prime minister, is now at its highest since 1994. Like Thatcher, Prime Minister David Cameron is sparring with Britain’s unions and with Europe, the Tories’ perennial boogeyman. And for good measure, riots erupted across England in August, just as race riots shook Britain not long after Thatcher came to power.

The sense of political deja vu has only sharpened the fault lines that Thatcher opened and that still run through British society.

To her admirers, she will always be the forceful leader who, blue eyes flashing and handbag swinging, dragged Britain out of its socialist torpor and restored the country’s swagger. Like Republicans who eagerly wrap themselves in the mantle of her contemporary and political soul mate, Ronald Reagan, many Conservatives here still invoke her name and zealously defend her reputation and legacy as arguably Britain’s most dominant prime minister of the 20th century after Winston Churchill.

Cue the loud sniping at “The Iron Lady’s” portrayal of Thatcher as a frail octogenarian suffering from dementia, even though Thatcher is a frail octogenarian suffering from dementia.

One of her former Cabinet ministers denounced it as “ghoulish”; another declared that she was never the “half-hysterical, over-emotional” woman shown in the movie.

“It’s a fantastic piece of acting by Meryl Streep, but you can’t help wondering, why do we have to have this film right now?” Cameron complained to the BBC. “It is a film much more about aging and elements of dementia rather than about an amazing prime minister.”

Cameron, who was 12 when Thatcher assumed the office he holds now, has steered away from describing himself as an out-and-out Thatcherite, preferring to cast himself as a new-model Tory.

“The Conservatives have a more, if you like, human face in David Cameron,” said Jon Tonge, a political scientist at the University of Liverpool. “But I wouldn’t say the policies are that different from Margaret Thatcher’s.”

On the other side, many of Thatcher’s detractors still regard her as a monster who promoted heedless individualism and who once famously declared there was “no such thing as society,” a creed they believe the current government is gleefully pursuing.

For them, the Thatcher years are a wound that not only never healed but has gotten worse. They too dislike the film’s portrait of Thatcher as a doddering old woman who has imaginary conversations with her dead husband, not because they prefer to see her in her prime but because it humanizes a woman they still consider the devil.

“You only have to say her name, and people express the most vehement opinions,” the film’s director, Phyllida Lloyd, told the Guardian newspaper. “I’ve met friends who have said, ‘I’m going to be very torn about [your movie], because I made a pact with a friend at university that we would party on the day of her death.'”

Internet forums, left-wing journals and radio call-in shows seethe with still-undimmed rage from Thatcher loathers who seem unable, or unwilling, to separate Lloyd’s work of cinematic art from its subject.

“How can anyone make a star out of this evil woman?” one listener emailed a radio call-in show. “If you look at England today, you can trace most of our problems back to her.”

Hey Michelle, how about if you wait until a Rush Limbaugh or a Sean Hannity depicts you as a crazed Lady Macbeth waving a bloody sword and your copy of Das Kapital around before you get your panties in a bunch over what very much appears to be a basically TRUE characterization of you?

You take a look at what the mainstream media and the Democrat Party did to conservative women and you seriously need to do a whole lot less talking and a whole lot more shutting the hell up.

Nothing screams “angry black woman” more loudly than playing the race card the moment you get confronted with some rather nasty facts about your disposition and the polarizing climate it is creating, fwiw.

White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley took heat from business executives Thursday for the Obama administration’s regulatory expansions. Daley also said he didn’t have any good answers for some of what President Obama is doing and expressed frustration about the “bureaucratic stuff that’s hard to defend.”

“Sometimes you can’t defend the indefensible,” Daley said at a National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) meeting.

Daley couldn’t answer basic questions and continually faced criticism from the executives in the room. The business leaders even applauded each other’s criticism of the administration. “At one point, the room erupted in applause when Massachusetts utility executive Doug Starrett, his voice shaking with emotion, accused the administration of blocking construction on one of his facilities to protect fish, saying government ‘throws sand into the gears of progress,’” wrote Peter Wallsten and Jia Lynn Yang in the Washington Post.

Americans for Limited Government Communications Director and former Labor Department Public Affairs Chief of Staff Rick Manning told The Daily Caller that Daley’s inability to defend Obama’s regulations is an indication that the administration’s plans aren’t working. Manning also points out that Daley’s meeting may have large political implications.

“Business community to William Daley, your Jedi tricks don’t work on us,” Manning said in an email. “The chickens are coming home to roost from the wholesale assault by Obama on the free enterprise system and the private job creators who make it run. The meeting itself is incredible in that it demonstrates just how vulnerable Obama feels in 2012.”

The Workforce Fairness Institute’s Fred Wszolek told The Daily Caller that Daley’s lackluster performance is even more questionable when comes to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and its campaign against the Boeing Company. The NLRB has gone after the Boeing Company for opening a new plant in South Carolina. Boeing’s new plant is an addition to its already-existing production lines in Washington state. The NLRB’s case hinges on whether Boeing made the decision to open the new plant as “retaliation” against machinist unions in Washington, even though no jobs were lost there. In fact, Boeing has added thousands of new jobs in Washington.

As a former Boeing board member before taking on his White House job, Daley voted in favor of opening the new South Carolina plant. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham has challenged Daley to come out and defend his vote in the face of the NLRB’s case, but he hasn’t yet done so.

“Bill Daley is White House chief of staff in an administration that is accusing a company where he served on the board of violating Federal labor law,” Wszolek said in an email. “The individual who launched the complaint against the Boeing Company was appointed to the post by President Obama and is currently a nominee. Now, to top it all off, Daley states he cannot defend the ‘indefensible’ conduct of his own administration, which presumably speaks to the Boeing matter.”

This man is an abject disgrace. He is everything I expected from God Damn America. There is no longer any question that God has set His face against America because it elected an evil demonic fool and will not drive him out of office in disgrace.

“Government throws sand into the gears of progress.” There’s your basic truth about reality that no Marxist Democrat will ever understand.

Kirsten Powers is a reliable liberal and a feminist. But she had no time for the National Organization for Women (N.O.W.) when they began demonizing Sarah Palin. She said:

Kirsten Powers: “It’s not the National Organization for Women, right? But it’s not. It’s really the National Organization for Liberal Women. It’s not the National Organization for Women, because she’s a woman. And they put out a statement saying, “Not all women speak for women. Sarah Palin doesn’t speak for women.” Well, look; this woman, when I look at her – even if I don’t support her, you know, a lot of her policies, she is the embodiment of what feminism was all about. She’s a mother, she’s successful, her husband helps with the children. You know, we should be exited about this, even if you don’t support her.”

And Kirsten Powers hit it on the head. NOW isn’t pro-woman; if anything it is profoundly ANTI-woman (if you are a woman who cares about being a good wife and a good mother, they despise you). Rather, NOW is pro-liberal. It is also pro-hypocrite: they will NOT go after liberals who do things that they would scream about if a conservative had done them.

-Rahm Emanuel’s (President Obama’s Chief of Staff) comment to a male White House staffer, according to a soon-to-be released book, The Promise by Newsweek magazine columnist Jonathan Alter.

So we can readily understand the chief of staff of the Obama administration’s position. Women are inferiors. They are neither intellectually or emotionally qualified to do anything but bend over barefoot so they can get pregnant. And if anyone acts in any way like a worthless woman, he or she is not worth squat.

Women deserved to be demeaned and marginalized. As does everyone who in any way suggests any scintilla of “tampon-ness.”

Heck. This might be useful for understanding why so many women are liberals and Democrats. They’re just not “up” to being anything better, poor useless little tampon-wearing dears. You can’t expect anything more out of them.

Just imagine the hell-hath-no-fury if Karl Rove had said something like that. They would be calling for his resignation in droves, and every “journalist” would make certain that everyone heard about it, and that everyone knew it was a loathsome thing for Rove to say.

Liberals live in a world of abject hypocrisy. It is their defining essence.

Fortunately for Democrats, it is also the defining essence of the mainstream media.

This article from a mainstream liberal does so many things. 1) It tells us the only thing that keeps Obama from already being the complete loser and failure Jimmy Carter was is Rahm Emanuel; 2) It tells us that Barack Obama has repeatedly ignored wise advice and paid attention to far-left liberal lunacy; and 3) It points out that the failure of health care isn’t Republican obstructionism, but Barry Hussein stupidity and his refusal to try to pass bills that Republicans could have supported.

I’m glad that even liberals are starting to recognize that this health care mess we’re in wasn’t the Republicans’ fault; it was Obama’s incompetence and hard-core liberal ideology.

It is the current fashion to blame President Obama’s disappointing first year on his chief of staff. “First, remove Rahm Emanuel,” writes Leslie Gelb in the Daily Beast, because he lacks “the management skills and discipline to run the White House.”

They join liberal interests who despised Emanuel long before he branded them “retarded.” Jane Hamsher of firedoglake.com, together with conservative activist Grover Norquist, demanded a Justice Department investigation into Emanuel, who is “far too compromised to serve as gatekeeper to the president.”

As Emanuel would say: What the [expletive deleted]?

Clearly, “Rahmbo” has no shortage of enemies in this town, and with Obama’s approval rating dipping below 50 percent, they have ammunition. But sacking Emanuel is the last thing the president should do.

Obama’s first year fell apart in large part because he didn’t follow his chief of staff’s advice on crucial matters. Arguably, Emanuel is the only person keeping Obama from becoming Jimmy Carter.

Obama chose the profane former Clinton adviser for a reason. Where the president is airy and idealistic, Rahm is earthy and calculating. One thinks big; the other, a former House Democratic Caucus chair, understands the congressional mind, in which small stuff counts for more than broad strokes.

Obama’s problem is that his other confidants — particularly Valerie Jarrett and Robert Gibbs, and, to a lesser extent, David Axelrod — are part of the Cult of Obama. In love with the president, they believe he is a transformational figure who needn’t dirty his hands in politics.

The president would have been better off heeding Emanuel’s counsel. For example, Emanuel bitterly opposed former White House counsel Greg Craig’s effort to close the Guantanamo Bay prison within a year, arguing that it wasn’t politically feasible. Obama overruled Emanuel, the deadline wasn’t met, and Republicans pounced on the president and the Democrats for trying to bring terrorists to U.S. prisons. Likewise, Emanuel fought fiercely against Attorney General Eric Holder’s plan to send Khalid Sheik Mohammed to New York for a trial. Emanuel lost, and the result was another political fiasco.

Obama’s greatest mistake was failing to listen to Emanuel on health care. Early on, Emanuel argued for a smaller bill with popular items, such as expanding health coverage for children and young adults, that could win some Republican support. He opposed the public option as a needless distraction.

The president disregarded that strategy and sided with Capitol Hill liberals who hoped to ram a larger, less popular bill through Congress with Democratic votes only. The result was, as the world now knows, disastrous.

Had it gone Emanuel’s way, a politically popular health-care bill would have passed long ago, leaving plenty of time for other attractive priorities, such as efforts to make college more affordable. We would have seen a continuation of the momentum of the first half of 2009, when Obama followed Emanuel’s strategy and got 11 substantive bills on his desk before the August recess.

Instead, Congress has ground to a halt, on climate legislation, Wall Street reforms and virtually everything else. Emanuel, schooled by Bill Clinton, knew what the true believers didn’t: that bite-sized proposals add up to big things.

Contrast Emanuel’s wisdom with that of Jarrett, in charge of “intergovernmental affairs and public engagement” — two areas of conspicuous failure. Jarrett also brought in Desiree Rogers as White House social secretary; the Salahi embarrassment ensued. Then there’s Gibbs. It’s hard to make the case that you’re a post-partisan president when your on-camera spokesman is a hyper-partisan former campaign flack.

No wonder Emanuel has set up his own small press operation and outreach function to circumvent the dysfunctional ones that Jarrett and Gibbs run. Obama needs an old Washington hand to replace Jarrett and somebody with gravitas on the podium to step in for Gibbs.

The failure of the president’s message also reflects on his message maven, Axelrod, who is an adept strategist but blinded by Obama love. A good example was Obama’s unproductive China trip in November. Jarrett, Gibbs and Axelrod went along as courtiers; Emanuel remained at his desk in Washington, struggling to keep alive the big health-care bill that he didn’t want in the first place.

In hiring Emanuel, Obama avoided the mistakes of his Democratic predecessors, who first gave the chief of staff job to besotted loyalists. Now in trouble, Obama needs fewer acolytes and more action. Rahm should stay.

If Rahm Emanuel doesn’t have a giant man-crush on Barack Obama, maybe he should stay. Certainly, if the Milbrank article has any truth to it, Rahm Emanuel would be the only one at the White House who has either common sense or a freaking clue.

It’s actually quite funny. Democrats are increasingly at each others’ throats while all the while telling everyone (and I’m sure trying to reassure themselves) that everything is right as rain.

Whether Rahm Emanuel stays, or whether someone else goes, Barry Hussein is an utter failure, and a future utter disgrace. You can change the whole rest of the team and it won’t matter, because their franchise player is an incompetent loser.

When Barack Obama asked Sen. Rahm Emanuel to be his White House chief-of-staff, few political insiders were surprised. The Chicago congressman and chairman of the House Democratic Caucus has been described in the past as a profane, hyperactive attack dog — and it is just this sort of steamrolling personality that makes him such a valuable asset. There are few people in Washington D.C. who could make for such a formidable gatekeeper to the Oval Office.

Emanuel’s nickname is “Rahmbo,” and he is known for mowing down his opponents. Coming out of Chicago, both he and Obama know the value of muscle.

Now, me, I wish that Obama had picked up some snarling, frothing-at-the-mouth Rottweiler chained up in some crack dealer’s front yard for the girls’ “puppy,” and picked a reasonably decent and human chief-of-staff instead.

Obama promises a whole new, wonderful world where everybody loves each other. And then he goes and gets himself the most rabid, vicious, frothing at the mouth attack dog he can find:

And Emanuel’s partisanship—after winning back the House in 2006, he recommended that Republicans “go f*** themselves“—could undercut Obama’s promises to reach across the aisle.

COULD? Did they say ‘Could’?

Yeah. The way dressing his entire cabinet in Nazi SS uniforms COULD undercut Obama’s promises of an “unshakable commitment” to Israel.

I’m sure that Barack Obama will keep his promise to his girls and get them some really nice puppy. As for his promise to be a “new politician” epitomizing “hope” and “change” that he made to the other 300 million Americans – well, we can quote Emanuel’s famous line to them.

Sooner or later, the public will come to realize they bought a bunch of bogus promises.